Update on my Star Trek game: I've found a design that I really like for my exploration cruisers. I split the ship into two, a 40k ton commercial "saucer section" that tugs around a 26k ton secondary hull. In addition to the tug the saucer has hangars for survey craft and some fuel and maintenance reserves, while the secondary hull has military engines, a fairly short range, a long deployment time, and a battery of
particle beamsphasers and photon torpedoes. During survey missions they normally stay attached, but if the ship gets into trouble the secondary hull can separate and fight at full speed.
This brings us to the story of the Horatio. USS Horatio, an Ambassador-class starship, was scouting Romulan space when it ran into some Romulan fuel harvesters with a light escort. The Federation and the Romulans are currently at war, so the Horatio attacked and destroyed all of them besides an escort cruiser that surrendered. The captured ship can't go anywhere under its own power -- in fact there aren't many undamaged components left -- but I wanted to try to recover it, so the Horatio's saucer tugged it to a safer system where a recovery vessel could pick it up. The secondary hull remained where it was while the ship's shuttles conducted survey operations. Meanwhile, though, a fleet of Romulan warships took up station at the jump point into the system, cutting off the Horatio's saucer from the rest of the ship! So now I'm assembling a fleet to retake the jump point so that I can reunite the Horatio's saucer and secondary hull.